by Jason Offutt
How to Identify Killer Robots
Today’s killer robots are easy to identify; they’re either areal drones or tank treads equipped with high-powered machine guns. Unfortunately, if one’s close enough for you to identify it for what it is, you’re not going to make it through this paragraph. Killer robots from the future are a bit tougher to ID because they look and sound just like us.
Problem Two: they look and sound just like us. I’m not suggesting shooting everyone you see on the off chance it will be a killer robot from the future sent to destroy you (although it may be here in our time right now looking for your address in the telephone book). This will probably land you in jail, and the world needs you on the outside when autonomous robots that consider us no more than natural resource-devouring parasites start blowing everything to shit.
Killer Robot Powers
Killer robots have ten simple powers:
1) They can’t feel pain.
2) They can’t feel pity.
3) They can’t be distracted.
4) They don’t get hungry.
5) They don’t get horny.
6) They don’t get tired.
7) They don’t feel fear.
8) If this killer robot is from the future, it has access to every scrap of information on what you’ve done and what you’re going to do.
9) They never miss.
10) One of them is standing behind you right now.
Killer Robot Weaknesses
Killer robots have ten simple weaknesses:
1) Large crushing machines.
2) Smelters.
3) High explosives.
4) Being dropped from someplace really, really high, like space.
5) Reprogrammed and highly advanced killer robots from farther in the future than they are. However, these are relatively hard to come by. It’s not like Target sells them.
6) Space aliens. Okay, I’m just guessing here, but if a civilization were able to travel vast interstellar distances, you’d think it would come with enough firepower to blow up whatever it finds (see Chapter 5).
7) Killer robots weigh a minimum of 500 pounds, so it’s hard for them to follow someone traveling by light aircraft or kayak.
8) Simple wear and tear. If, like Sarah Connor, you can continually evade the killer robot following you, eventually the thing will break down. Although killer robots are programmed to be resourceful, it can’t pick up replacement parts at AutoZone.
9) Removing its head. If you’re close enough that removing a killer robot’s head is an option, you’re probably seconds away from a violent, bloody death. However, if you can remove it—quite possibly with a cutting torch—this will separate its central processing unit from its power source. You’d get the same result taking the batteries out of a normal American’s TV remote control.
10) Cement. Although encasing a killer robot in a freshly poured concrete basement might not kill it, this will at least keep it trapped in a cement cocoon until the house is torn down in 100 years. Then you’ll have nothing to worry about. It’ll just go after your great-great grandchildren.
How to Avoid Killer Robots
DO NOT—and I don’t know how much more I can emphasize this—BE NAMED SARAH OR JOHN CONNOR.
If you are named Sarah or John Connor, you’re doomed. Sure, you can avoid killer robots for a while, moving from town to town, hiding in Mexico with a bunch of insane drug-running banditos, or living in an underground government bunker awaiting the death of all mankind. But the killer robot will eventually find and kill you.
If you’re not named Sarah or John Connor, you’re probably okay. Unless, of course, you’re a computer programmer with an ethical problem about artificial intelligence and really want to put a stop to it. Then you might as well just wear a shirt that reads, “Shoot Me.”
A good way to avoid killer robot is to dress and walk like everyone else. Watch a lot of reality television, master the vernacular of your surroundings, and just blend in. If a killer robot follows you into a mall and you look exactly like everyone else, your chance of escape has increased dramatically. Also, dress in layers. Possessing the ability to change your appearance like a chameleon not only increases your lifespan, it increases your chances of getting multiple discounts at Mr. Wok.
Who’s Going to Help You
Problem Three: Nobody is going to help you. Everyone will think you’re crazy until the machines take over. Then you’d better expect some apologies, pal. So keep this book by your bedside. You need to keep your Bad Ass Factor somewhere between John Rambo and Bruce Lee.
Your Arsenal and Where to Keep It
Killer robots are probably the hardest things for you to kill. Even harder than dinosaurs. Sure, some killer robots look like us, are covered with living flesh, and speak English almost as well as an illegal immigrant, but underneath all this they have no heart—a lot like Joe Biden. But if one of these soulless monsters enters your home looking for you, there are ways to render it a powerless, mindless, heap—a lot like Joe Biden.
Things You Should Have Everywhere
Guns: These weapons, that work so well when it comes to destroying vampires, werewolves, and zombies, will not kill a killer robot. They will, however, cause a killer robot to pause and straighten its sunglasses, giving yourself enough time to blow up your house.
The ability to blow up your house: Killer robots are vulnerable to explosions. Unless your home is some kind of pansy eco-friendly place, you’ll have some sort of gaseous flammable material pouring through pipes in your basement. Natural gas or propane just need a little coaxing and boom, house in the air. Rig C-4 to a thermostat detonator at 84 degrees, and the next time a killer robot targets you in your own home, welcome it in climate control-style. Then, when the killer robot appears, crank the heater. In order to escape a fiery death, dive screaming out a window. Diving and screaming at 83 degrees gives you style points, but it also gives you an equal number of stupid points. I’d dive at 82 degrees just to be safe.
Things You Should Have in the Kitchen
Vegetable oil: For home defense, if you suspect a killer robot from the future might be interested in you, hoard vegetable oil like it is the Great Depression. Having every nook in your house stacked with bottles of vegetable oil makes you not only prepared for a corn famine, you’re also ready for a killer robot home invasion. Just tip over every bottle of oil and the walking machine can’t stand. When a killer robot breaks into your home looking to pump you full of .9mm rounds, it won’t be able to hit you if it’s face down on the linoleum. Sure, it will get back up and eventually kill you, but that’s why you need to be ready for its pursuit.
Things You Should Have in the Garage
Circular saw: Use a circular saw to cut wedges into the floor, and the robot’s shear weight will drop it to the floor beneath. This will not disable the robot. However, if you’ve thought this through, while the robot drops two floors into a basement filled with wet concrete, you should have enough time to blow up your house.
Automobiles: Much like guns, hitting a killer robot with a car will just delay the inevitable. The average American automobile, although stylish, isn’t heavy enough to disable a killer robot. However, if you can survive smashing a killer robot into a bridge abutment with your Toyota, you might be able to limp over to things you can rely on outside.
Things You Can Rely on Outside
Heavy construction equipment: Although most Americans don’t think they have access to bulldozers, these crushing, killing machines are sitting on construction sites all around us. With roads, shopping centers, government buildings, etc., going up in every neighborhood, bulldozers, cranes, backhoes and graders are just an illegal U-turn and a few orange barrels away. Learn how to hot-wire a vehicle and use this knowledge to drive a dozer over a walking, talking machine designed to kill you. And, while you’re at it, drive over the killing machine two or three times. The cops won’t be there for hours to arrest you for vandalism, and you may as well have some
fun. You’ve earned it; you just saved the future of mankind.
Deep water: Lakes don’t work; neither do rivers. However, oceans and inland seas are fantastic. By boarding a boat bound to someplace awesome right as a killer robot is ready to strike, you not only get to watch the killer robot walk into the sea chasing you, you get to sit on the beach in Tahiti, sipping something tropical, waiting for the robot to walk out of the water just in time to see you boarding another boat to somewhere even cooler. Robots suck.
Behavior of the Killer Robot While You’re Trying to Kill It
Since killer robots are programmed to kill you, its behavior is to kill you. That’s all it does.
Disposing of the Body
It’s a robot made out of metal. Reduce, reuse, recycle.
Bill: Kill it, Bev.
Pennywise the Dancing Clown (laughs): Me? Oh you are priceless brat. I am eternal, child. I am the eater of worlds, and of children. And you are next.
--It, 1990
Chapter 7: Demon Clowns
Clowns are the face of hell. Vanilla soft-serve skin, pants big enough to hide at least three kidnapped children, and a nose like your uncle who always scared you with stories about the war. But at least you know your uncle’s not a demonic killing machine—he’s just drunk. But clowns? They’ll eat you. If one of these beasts randomly approached you on a city street, you’d run screaming, hoping like heck somebody would come to your aid and beat the thing in the head with a trashcan. Clowns. I hate them all.
Unfortunately, the average U.S. citizen can’t randomly beat clowns without the possibility of criminal prosecution. Why? Because not all of them are monsters.
Problem One: There are two major types of clowns, 1) Demon Clowns, and 2) people dressed as Demon Clowns. Seriously misguided people, but people all the same. The reason human clowns exist is due to U.S. political correctness and our propensity to judge anything evil as simply “different.” For example, if Osama Bin Laden had been captured instead of killed, he’d have gotten his own sitcom on NBC called Oh, that Osama. Clowns make Osama Bin Laden look like Santa Claus. Clowns are not happy, fun-loving jokesters who entertain children at parties. Monster Hunters can see through this veil, and we call those clowns serial killer John Wayne Gacy. Wake up at 3 a.m. with that fat bastard looming over your bed in white face paint and, after soiling yourself, tell me how much you like clowns, pal.
Problem Two: Kaboom cereal. The beast staring from the box on the breakfast table—a painted demon Mom okayed by intentionally sticking it in the shopping cart to hide her gallon of vodka—is not making sure your children get their daily pound of sugar and at least eight vitamins and minerals; it’s brainwashing. The clownies want our children to be so comfortable with them they’ll walk right into the Funhouse for a good basting before lunch. If Satan were as nice as Stalin, he’d be a clown. Studies have shown that 44 percent of the population is afraid of clowns. Heck, only 25 percent of the population is afraid of Godzilla, and he’s a whole lot bigger than a clown. That should tell you something. Clowns are evil, and just like children can always tell when there’s a ice cream truck within ten city blocks, they instinctively know that all pasty-faced monsters want their soul.
How to Identify a Demonic Clown
The Identifying the Most Terrifying Demonic Beast Ever quiz.
Clowns look like:
a) Lucifer.
b) Cthuhlu.
c) A crazed vagrant.
d) Miley Cyrus.
e) All of the above.
The answer is e, and if you’re going to try and make some exception for d) Miley Cyrus, look at that half-naked Vanity Fair photo shoot with her dad in 2008 and tell me I’m wrong.
Demon Clowns are divided into three categories: white face, Auguste, and hobo. Otherwise known as Hitler, Beelzebub, and Nancy Pelosi. The origins of these categories aren’t important; their appearance and behavior is—they will mimic human clowns in appearance and behavior. Know your enemy.
White Face: As their name implies, these clowns are as terrifying as that time you accidentally flashed a gang sign in downtown Detroit. Most white face clowns possess patches of crimson hair and wear one-piece Elvis jumpsuits baggy enough to stow butcher knives, scalpels, a hideously deformed conjoined-twin, and usually tentacles. These clowns are the most intelligent demon clowns and are, therefore, the ringleaders of evil clown armies. Alone they are stealthy, quick-witted predators, and when not pretending to be a human dressed as a clown, lurk in dark allies, basements, and under your bed.
Auguste: These clowns possess the red nose, dripping smile, and glistening eyes of the white face, but the skin color of the Auguste is that of a human’s, which makes it potentially a more dangerous clown. With all the bad makeup, people might mistake the Auguste clown for a televangelist’s wife right before it eats their face. The Auguste clown tries to fit into human culture but fails in the more subtle points of style. Their jackets are too large or too small and just the wrong shade of Shamrock Shake. Their hats are tiny, barely sitting atop these beast’s swollen, misshapen skulls, and their shirt lapels are from 1974. The Auguste clowns are stupid killer clowns, just buffoon minions in the demon armies of the White Face.
Hobo: Shambling through reality in worn, patchwork clothing, staring at the world from behind a five o’clock shadow, this demon clown is the sneakiest of clown creatures. “Don’t look at the bum,” runs through your mind as it shuffles past. But you can’t help it; you glance at this shambling mess, and it smiles at you. Its double row of pointed teeth behind its smeary smile warns that you have seconds to live. The hobo clown is even more deadly than the Auguste, because at a cursory glance it looks to be one of the many unfortunate wretches who cling to the outskirts of our society, and who pays attention to bums anyway? They might ask for money.
Demon Clown Powers
When it comes to monster powers, clowns don’t have the pure Hulk strength of a reanimated corpse, the rending and tearing power of a werewolf, or the awing power of a dragon—they’re much more dangerous.
Demon Clowns have two types of powers, Subtle and Wet Your Pants.
Subtle powers
• Mesmerization: Clowns, appearing as harmless, bumbling jokesters, use this power to make parents blindly pay them money, and let them loose amongst their children at parties, fashioning balloons into puppies, flowers, and assault weapons. These evil beasts use this power of hypnosis to feast on your children’s souls, so make sure you never pay until after the party. They’re only going to buy booze with it anyway. Children’s souls taste great with a Boone’s Farm Strawberry Wine chaser.
• Shrinkage: The ability to squeeze into a really tiny car with twenty other clowns is a clowning staple. Although this may seem funny to the audience, Demon Clowns actually possess the ability to shrink to fit their environment. That’s why they fit so easily under your bed.
• Pratfalls: Watching a clown take a pie to the face, fall on their head, or be gored by a bull only to jump up and grin at the audience with a garish smile that would make Freddy Kruger cry for his mother, takes your mind off of what the clown is actually trying to do—which is kill you.
Wet Your Pants
• Teeth: A clown’s mouth is full of teeth, a lot like a Komodo Dragon’s. If one of these white-faced monsters grins to reveal multiple rows of pointed teeth the size of hypodermic needles used by zoo vets, tell me your heart wouldn’t seize up. And, like hypodermic needles, these teeth are loaded with toxins. Not poison, but snow cones. The snow cone part won’t kill you, but you’ll have a heller brain freeze while the pasty-faced beast devours your entrails.
• Handkerchiefs: Although a clown’s chief attack is surprise followed by a severed jugular, a prepared potential victim (such as yourself) might avoid the creature’s first attack, making the Demon Clown rely on its secondary assault: an endless string of throat-choking handkerchiefs. Warning: If a clown ever reaches into its pocket—even at your six-year-old’s birthday party—bash it with t
he nearest heavy object, such as a cinder block or the fat Johnson kid.
• Minions: What’s more frightening than a clown approaching you in the dim light of a four-story parking garage, its big floppy shoes scraping the pavement and its gloved hand (which hides its hideous claws) either holding a knife or a bouquet of flowers? Yeah, who cares at this point? But, what’s more frightening? More clowns. A white face surrounded by a pack of Augustes and smelly hobos ready to do its bidding is enough to cause any sane man to throw himself off the side of the garage.
But we’re not sane, are we? We’re prepared. So let’s waste these monsters.
Demon Clown Weaknesses
Although a clown’s teeth are sharp and plentiful, clowns themselves are fleshy and vulnerable to physics. Did you know a clown and golf ball fall at the same rate when dropped from a ten-story building? Try it sometime. Oh, and booze. Clowns love booze.
How to Avoid a Demon Clown
Stay away from circuses, fast food restaurants, gateways to hell, and for God’s sake, don’t step out of bed during the night. They’re there, under your bed, just waiting for a firm, juicy ankle to drop. We all know clowns want to eat you; don’t make it easy for them. Another good way to avoid clowns is to make them avoid you. Walk into an area where clowns are usually sighted and brandish a gun. You’ll see what I mean.
Who’s Going to Help You
Everyone. Nearly every fucking person on the planet. Clowns are that freaky.
